One of the things that Enterprise Vault allows you to create is Shared Archives. These don’t have a mailbox associated with them, and don’t have a folder structure, ie they are “flat” or “unstructured” (some people will remember this was the case in the early days of EV with mailbox archives).

I’m curious if people use them extensively, or for specific purposes. Do you use them?

One of the ways of creating these archives is to use EVPM, but you can also create them directly in the VAC. You can use either method to give people permission to items in the archive, and like a regular archive you can choose whether those permissions are read/write/etc